Basic composition techniques

Juxtaposition is easy to do when you know how, but isn’t a particularly common occurrence in everyday photography, so that increased the degree of difficulty. You can use it to varying degrees of effectiveness depending on how obvious you make it, and it’s a really good way of making what could have been a boring photo into something much more interesting.

When a frame is being divided by a single, dominant line, it’s more often than not, a Horizon, as they’re fairly common in outdoor photography, particularly landscapes. If the photo is of nothing particularly interesting, then usually this line becomes be the dominant part of the photo for the way in which it separates the frame.

Triangles are in almost everything we see, in one way or another, it’s just a case of distinguishing them and knowing what to do with them. They make great compositional tools as they’re easy to make, manipulate, and are remarkably common. Triangles are a great way of combining different compositional techniques such as lines and paths and using them to create a more interesting part of a photograph, but the best part about using a triangle is their ability to make a photo feel stable or unstable.

I’ve mentioned visual weight a few times now, but I’ve never actually gone into detail about what it actually is; it’s a lot more then just the size of an object in a scene. Visual weight is determined by the way that we look at the photo and what we see first and spend the most amount of time looking at. If you understand the visual weight of different objects in the scene, you can use your knowledge effectively to encourage the viewer to see the photo in a certain way.

Balance is at the base of every composition; it determines whether the photo is pleasing and harmonious to look at, or rather uncomfortable and unresolved. If you look at balance in a literal sense, a very basic analogy comes to mind which is that or the weighing scales. If you divide the photo in half with a fulcrum in the middle, you can place objects in different parts of the scene to make the photo appear balanced or unbalanced.

Vertical lines come right after horizontal lines in importance and that’s for a single reason – the way our eyes view an image. Our eyes scan a photo from left to right horizontally and will pick up horizontal lines first, and because of this, vertical lines are excellent at complimenting horizontal lines with their perpendicular, stopping nature when they intersect. This is a great technique to adding tension into a photo.

This is one of the most common composition techniques around and it’s that way for a reason; it works. Photos that are correctly composed using the rule of thirds create depth and interest in a photo, and add an interesting balance between subjects and background. Once you start playing around with this rule, you’ll start to see it more naturally and your photos will begin to improve.